Posted May 05, 2026 by Cheeseness
Hi people! Apologies for yet another late-but-not-as-late post - here's the April Fossil Sweeper "mid-month" status update!
Over the period that this post covers, I spent most of my time getting back into globe asset production.
Continuing with work mentioned in the previous month's post, I've been working on revised globe asset production workflows. While testing different approaches, I came to discover that when I had previously understood my to-sphere addon and gimball-rotation-around-sphere-centre to be allowing me to keep vertices properly aligned to the sphere surface, neither were behaving correctly when multiple shape keys were involved. Because I generally am not moving individual vertices far, things generally appear to be staying a fixed distance from the sphere origin, but once that goes 90 degrees or so in any direction, it appears that each vertex is rotating around a centre that is offset equal to that provided by preceding shape keys.
This was pretty distressing to discover, but I was eventually able to get the kind of behaviour I expected from separating each shape key out into its own model with the previous cumulative shape keys as the basis, and then transfer them back to the original once I was done editing. As a process, it's fiddly and cumbersome, but I can automate the separation and combining of shape keys without a lot of hassle, so I am at least where I thought I was a month ago rather than back at square one.
I've also done a preliminary first pass on most of the rest of the globe's continental drift animations going back to the beginning of the Mesozoic. I'm thinking that I might add some extra bits and pieces in just to simplify the expansion of some places that have been compressed/subducted (mostly the Himalayas). I'm also thinking of separating each landmass into its own mesh so that if I need to add extra shape keys for some regions, I won't automatically inherit that extra complexity for everything. It'll also insulate me a little against anything that might bust up a mesh somewhere along the way - something I managed to do yesterday, where now the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea have geometry that passes through to the southern hemisphere. Good times. (no big deal though - the current stuff was always temporary)
For anybody who hasn't been following dev streams, I've missed a few this year. I never really had a strong schedule, but I think since I started doing them I'd maybe missed 4 or 5 up until the start of this year, and over the past few months, I feel like I've skipped more than that. It's been pretty disappointing, especially while trying to establish myself on a new streaming platform, but that's life sometimes. The past 12 months have been a bumpy year for me on a personal level, and I feel like I've lost a lot of the balance I'd slowly built up over the preceding years. I'm working on regaining that and have made some changes to my personal life that will hopefully calm things down, though I am expecting that it'll be some time before that has any visible impact.
In the meantime, sorry to anybody who's keen on these things - Mastodon and Discord are still probably the best places to keep track of announcements for when streams are going live or are being cancelled. I often don't know myself until the end of Friday whether or not I'm going to end up skipping a dev stream.
And that's about it for this post. Thanks as always for reading and for your patience, if you check out test builds and have any feedback, I'd love to hear your thoughts!